This one’s for a pretty narrow audience: the Hoppean “forced integration” types. If you’re reading Hoppe, my expectation is I don’t have to convince you of the merits of individualism or the pitfalls of collectivism, so my goal is to expose Hoppe’s position and yours as collectivist nonsense. You can offer any number of defenses, and I have no doubt you will, but you can’t reconcile it with methodological (or social) individualism.

By invoking the “forced integration” argument you violate methodological individualism not once, but twice. First, you identify the would-be immigrant according to his membership in some undesirable collective. You might defend your desire to prohibit Mexicans or Muslims or communists or whatever, but the “integration” part of your argument means the real collective is “from outside muh borders”, or else you want members of whatever group deported if they already live here, in which case we have a whole other conversation on our hands.

Then there’s the “forced” part of the argument, which unavoidably implies you have some right to the territory the immigrant wants to occupy and which you don’t own (or again it’s an entirely different argument). You can only assert this as a collective right, which you know doesn’t exist, so you will say you aren’t making such a claim, but as I pointed out it’s unavoidably implicit in your argument whether you like it or not. If it’s “forced” only in the sense that you don’t like it, you kinda need to stop calling for the use of force to carry out your wishes with respect to resources you don’t own and people who are not you. If you mean anything else, you’re laying claim to a right you cannot, individualistically, possibly have.

One comment

Great post. I have a certain understanding for those who profess liberty but then take unliberal positions as I see daily how difficult it is for many to act from principle. I claim no credit for doing so myself because I am blessed with a poor memory. Wtf, you say. Blessed with a poor memory? Yes! I cannot recall facts easily but, for some strange reason, I can easily recall principles and deduce the facts from them. I believe that the majority, who can simply recall stuff are the unlucky ones because they have no need, and therefore little practice in selecting a principle and extrapolating from it. This mental muscle needs regular exercise.

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